Earth's Wild Music Quotes

“When you are quiet, the silence blows against your mind and etches away everything that is soft and unimportant. What is left is what is real: pure awareness and the very hardest questions.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth's Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World

“Did dinosaurs sing? Was there a teeming, singing wilderness with all the species thumping around, tuning up for the next millennia? Of course, dinosaurs sang, I thought. They are the ancestors of the singing birds and cousins to the roaring crocodiles…turns out, no. Turns out the syrinx, the organ that produces birdsong and the larynx, the organ that produces operatic arias, didn’t evolve until after the dinosaur extinction event…Some dinosaurs blew air into their closed mouths and through nasal cavities into resonance chambers, which we see in fossils as bony crests. They made the forest echo with clear, ominous tones, eerily like a cello. I have heard it in recordings scientists made of the sound they produced when they blew air through crests constructed to mimic lambeosaurus’s. Some dinosaurs cooed to their mates like doves…turns out that even if dinosaurs didn’t sing, they danced. There is evidence in vigorous scrape marks found in 100-million year old Colorado sandstone. From the courting behavior of ostriches and grouse, scientists envision the dinosaur males coming together on courting grounds, bobbing and scratching, flaring their brilliant feathers and cooing. Imagine: huge animals, each weighing more than a dozen football teams, shaking the Earth for a chance at love.

What the story of the dinosaurs tells me is that if the earth didn’t have music, it would waste no time inventing it. In birds, tantalizing evidence of birdsong is found in 67-million-year old fossils, marking the first know appearance of the syrinx. Now the whole Earth can chime, from deep in the sea to high in the atmosphere with the sounds of snapping shrimp, singing mice, roaring whales, moaning bears, clattering dragonflies, and a fish calling like a foghorn. Who could catalog the astonishing oeuvre of the Earth? And more songs are being created every year.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth's Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World

“I know that whatever is left of the planet when the pillage ends that’s the world that the children will live in. Whatever genetic song lines, whatever fragments of whale squeal and shattered harmonies are life, that’s what evolution has got to work with. Music is the trembling urgency and exuberance of life ongoing.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth's Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World

“We hear most acutely in the range of 2.5 megahertz, which is the peak of birdsong. Human speech is pitched much lower, one kilohertz or below, and so is less central to our hearing. Why is this? Acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton surmises that our bodies evolved not for cocktail party conversation but rather to harvest sounds from wild creatures. These are the aural signals on which our species’ success depended: Birds chatting, unconcerned. Herds gathering. Corvids flocking. Sudden silence. They spoke clearly: Here is safety. Here is water. Here is food. Here is danger.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth's Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World

“Listen to. To hear with thoughtful attention. To hold something close, to attend to it, to be astonished by it, to devote your life to its mysteries, to name it precisely, to wonder how it comes to be. To stay awake to it. To move closer to the wild and twittering night. To let it cover you and keep you safe. To me, listening is starting to sound a lot like love.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth's Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World

“There is necessary beauty in the world, I understand this. Beauty to attract mates, to attract prey, to attract pollinators. But so much of beauty seems to be bycatch, “unnecessary beauty,” waste products of essential processes. The opalescence of the inside of an oyster shell, a rainbow around the moon, a baby’s dreaming smile. Profligate beauty is a mystery to me. Sing praises.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth's Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World

“Human ears are built to hear birdsong, we hear most acutely in the range of 2.5 megahertz, which is the peak of birdsong. Human speech is pitched much lower, on kilohertz or below…Acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton surmises that our bodies evolved not for party conversation but rather to harvest sounds from wild creatures… the aural signals on which our species’ success depended. But that’s just the beginning of the meaning we harvest by listening. Victor Hugo reminded us that ‘music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.’ Listen. Breathe Earth’s wild music into you body. You are not alone. Here is the harmony of which you are a part. Your joy is the exhilaration of birds…The depth of your feelings is the depth of time. Your longing is a spring chorus of frogs, ‘the wordless voice of longing that resonates within us, the longing to continue, to participate in the sacred life of the world,’ as Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth's Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World

“As the Earth swung heavily on its bell-chain, the night began to toll. Deep, soft belling seemed to roll over the desert, and ancient stone and ancient bone resounded. The saguaros sang out. Sand sifted down the flank of the moon-borne ridge. A drop of water popped onto the pool. Another. The poorwill called again. Profundo, adagio, deeply, slowly, the music pulsed through the dark amphitheater. I lay still, shaken by the night’s extravagant expressions of profound joy. I would make myself silent and resonant, tuned to the wild Earth.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth's Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World

“Disaster calls us to action. They call us to levels of compassion and courage we did know we could reach. They smash us with sorrow and lift us with determination and moral resolved, the way a wave both makes and lifts us in the same wild movement. Disaster transforms sorrowful love into a force strong enough to change the trajectory of history….Dear Mary Oliver, do you think this might now be how we do the work of loving a weary, reeling world? And don’t we have to try?”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth's Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World

“In the fifty years that I have been writing about nature, roughly 60 percent of all individual mammals have been erased from the face of the Earth. The total population of North American red-winged blackbirds and robins have been cut by a third. Half of grassland birds have been lost. As many as one of out five species of organisms may be on the verge of extinction now, and twice that number could be lost by the end of the century…Unless the world acts to stop extinctions, I will write my last nature essay on a planet that is less than half a song-graced and life-drenched as the one where I began to write.”
― Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth's Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World